Almost four years ago the Taiwanese company called Tuniq Co. Ltd., which is a subdivision of Sumbeamtech, announced their Tuniq Tower 120 cooler. This solution won a lot of awards from online and printed publications and earned the well-deserved enthusiasts’ respect and love. Extremely high cooling efficiency of that solution and low level of generated noise at minimal fan rotation speed allowed successful CPU overclocking without making your ears suffer. It was Tuniq Tower 120 that was used to set quite a few overclocking records involving air-cooling.

Time went on, platforms and processors changed, and so did their heat dissipation as well as retention mechanisms. At the same time more and more new air-cooling solutions appeared in the rapidly growing market. The most remarkable one seems to be heat-pipe direct touch technology that is available from many well-known brand names today. The idea behind this technology is that the traditional chain including such links as “processor die → thermal interface → heat-spreader → thermal interface → cooler base plate → thermal glue/soldering → heatpipes” is missing two of them: “cooler base plate → thermal glue/soldering”. Theoretically, in this case the heat transfer and cooling efficiency should improve. Moreover, since the manufacturing process becomes a little simpler and there are no copper base plates involved anymore, the cooler should be cheaper, so that some manufacturers can actually roll out extremely efficient cooling solutions priced below $30.

Tuniq Company decided to keep up with the progress and this summer announced two new cooling solutions: Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme and Tuniq Propeller 120. The second cooler is not yet completely ready to come out, while the first one has already been tested in our lab.

Package and Accessories

The cooler comes in a large box with plastic handle designed primarily with black color scheme with a bit of blue. On the front of the box there are a cooler photo and three pictograms marking the supported key technologies:

The rest of the cardboard box is also not empty: there is everything you might want to know about the cooler and its accessories:

Inside the colorful cardboard casing there is another box made of thicker denser cardboard that contains a cooler sealed inside a clear plastic blister between two polyurethane foam panels. Beneath the cooler there is a small box with accessories:

Among them are a universal backplate, two retention kits, new Tuniq TX-3 thermal compound, fan rotation speed controller designed as a backpanel bracket and an installation instructions booklet.

Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme is made in China. Its recommended retail price is $59.90. It comes with 3-year warranty.